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Feature Articles - Satirical Magazines of the First World War: Punch and the Wipers Times

The Great War was dominated by two satirical
papers; Punch and the journal best known by it's original name, The Wipers
Times. Punch magazine was a well-established journal comparable in
style and content to today's Private Eye. It had a wide circle of
distribution and was recognised by the British Nation as a middle-class and
supposedly unbiased account of current affairs.

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The Wipers Times took its name for the army
slang for Ypres, where it was first produced. It emulated Punch, but
contained a more specific type of comedy relating exclusively to the
soldiers on the Western Front. The practicalities of trench warfare
had created a sudden and often uncomfortable closeness between classes, and
therefore The Wipers Times targeted a far wider audience class wise, despite
it's relatively limited circulation.

The two papers had many similarities, the
greatest being that they shared the same ethos. Both believed that
comedy should be employed in a cathartic role against the tension, fear and
grief caused by the fighting. However, both dramatically diverge in
outlook, contents, the ideas they pursued and the ways in which these ideas
were expressed and laid out within each paper.

This essay examines some of these traits and
tries to understand why the two papers were contextually so different.
I will also attempt to explain how both of these papers extolled a type of
comedy that was a highly subversive yet often employed tool during the Great
War, and how this was made possible.

Punch, or The London Charivari, officially
started production in 1842, although several magazines with almost identical
titles had been in circulation for some time. The concept for all of
these magazines was however the same - they were anti-establishment,
politically motivated satires, although the humour they contained was of a
fairly lowbrow level. The body of each magazine was based around three
main types: short articles, poems and black-cut illustrations - small prints
which accompanied puns either in the text or which ran underneath.

These prints became Punch's most distinctive
trademark, and the magazine helped initiate the techniques of using
captioned pen and ink drawings to depict political comedy which are still
used to great extent in newspapers today. In "A History of Punch"
(Collins, 1957), R.G.G. Price describes the ways in which Punch used these
new techniques to instigate its own brand of humour:

"The mock systemisation (of the articles and
illustrations) and the pin-pointing of the targets - two different types of
joke - created a tension between them. This kind of tension is one of
the great Punch qualities. The standard of writing and pithiness
varied very much from item to item. The political material was, on the
whole, keener than the social. Though Punch attacked separate abuses,
it had no programme and no philosophy" (p.23).

Punch uses a particular authorial voice to do
this; that of Mr Punch (the vile clown and wife batterer from Punch and Judy
shows - a symbol of anarchy and disorder) himself. As a detached
overseer to the process of history. This voice is a useful technique,
meaning that the author appears as an observer apparently confiding
exclusively in the reader. Mundane situations can be made bizarre as
the reader is forced to regard the situation in the way the author wants
them to rather the way that they are accustomed to. The cartoon below
demonstrates how this displacement works.

The Captain: "Your brother is doing splendidly
in the Battalion. Before long he'll be our best man."

The Sister: "Oh Reginald! Really this is so
very sudden."

(Punch, August 9th 1916.)

The cartoon takes a familiar wartime scenario
- a returning soldier and a young woman together, distorting it with a bad
pun and a misinterpretation by both characters. This cartoon is
typical of the humour employed in Punch.

By the 1910's, Punch was well established and
widely read. However it had become aimed exclusively at the upper
classes, with little appeal for the rest of society. Furthermore, the
art and text relied heavily on a recognisable series of caricatures, of
which the grotesque figure of Mr Punch himself, the swarthy worker man and
the overweight washerwoman were used to connote the working class.

Punch employed slang and phonetic dialects to
enforce these caricatures. Additionally depicting the working classes
as either rural yokels or stupid, dirty factory workers. On the other
hand, pretty girls and well-dressed men with large chests and even larger
moustaches represented the more virile and acceptable face of the upper
classes.. The magazine had softened in tone - although it could be
anarchic, Punch increasingly veered towards sentiment. These
sentimental aspects of the magazine were again very specific, depicting a
highly idealised ideas of the British nation. They described a rural
and unified country, associated in turn with the concepts of patriotism,
purity, beauty and strength.

A good example of this was the sub-editor, A.A.
Milne, who tended to extol the virtues of walking on the Sussex Downs with a
faithful dog and affectionately pastiched the upper class society life of
teas, cricket and hunting rather than producing anything that was socially
reactionary. When war broke out this pastoral context became a
dominant reference for the feeling of the nation, and Punch was utterly
subservient to these ideals. Typical of this trend is the poem In
Flanders Fields" by John McRae, published by the magazine on December 8th
1915.

When the war broke out, the editor of Punch
was Owen Seaman. Seaman had working class roots was initially
interested in making the paper as accessible to as many people as possible.
However, in actuality he became more and more resistant to innovation.
Under his editorship the paper became steadily more conservative.
Price describes his attitude as follows:

"The qualities that he wanted in his paper
were lucidity, regularity, intelligibility and soundness. He
considered that the reader, by paying for a copy, became entitled to
understand everything in it and therefore all the jokes must be aimed at the
maximum possible readership. There must be nothing for minorities,
nothing too subtle to appeal to the oldest and stupidest; "We can't edit a
paper for twenty readers" (p181-2).

Although Seaman wanted to encourage a wide
readership, his desire to make the paper accessible to all caused
stagnation. When the war broke out, he was initially undecided as to
how to approach the conflict. Punch had already been criticised in
preceding months for being too militant, although the magazines published
just before the war have a cautiously neutral feel to them. Seaman
seems to have been biding his time before making a decision about how to
approach the war should it happen.

In this atmosphere, the magazine published
only one strongly anti-war article. On 5th August 1914, sub editor A.A.
Milne wrote a piece called Armageddon, visualising the Olympian gods
orchestrating a war at the behest of his well-known character Porkins.
"We're getting flabby...A bit of a scrap with a foreign power will do us all
the good in the world...The lower classes seem to have no sense of
discipline nowadays. We want a war to brace us up." Prophetically,
after a years fighting there are one hundred thousand casualties and no sign
of the war ending.

On 4th September 1914, Seaman attended a
meeting at the Department of Information with some of the premier writers in
the country including Hardy, Galsworthy and J.M. Barrie. Hardy
recorded the aims of the meeting in his journal as "for the organisation of
public statements of the strength of the British case and principles in the
war by well-known men of letters". (The Later Years of Thomas
Hardy,1930). The results of this meeting were that these "men of
letters" decided to unanimously support the war effort and follow the public
sentiments of enthusiasm, nationalism and militarism. During the war
years, Punch published no more overtly anti-war statements.

For this reason, Punch is a dominant text in
our understanding of the war, exemplifying and misinterpreting public
sentiment from a civilian viewpoint. When the war began, Punch was
violently pro-war, articles and cartoons often recounting little more than
propaganda with very little comedic undertones. However, this attitude
discreetly wanes as the war dragged on and the civilian population became
increasingly discontented and disillusioned. It was impossible to
ignore the effects the fighting was starting to have, and as Punch moves
into the latter stages of 1917-18, this awareness becomes gradually visible.

Subversion creeps slowly into the magazine,
often by distorting the early techniques which the magazine had so
strenuously enforced. With a secondary source such as Punch, there are
problems. On the one hand, the government thought Seaman important
enough to include as one of the most influential literary figures of the
time, but on the other it provides and exaggerates an unrealistic gauge of
public sentiment. Although Punch invited independent submissions, it
was edited by a handful of journalists under extremely strict controls.

These were both internal (the editorial board)
and external (the DORA Bill, and the need for continued sales). Some
inclusions are far subtler than they first appear, containing surprising
subtexts. Others are nothing more than crude or inept propaganda.
Therefore it is often very difficult to tell whether Punch is extolling
conformist opinions of nationalism and militaristic chivalry encouraged by
the government, or if it does genuinely contain elements of political
discord and deviant anti-war statements.

Because of this attitude, Punch is often
misread by historians today. It is rarely analysed for it's own merits
and used as a counterpoint in anthologies to poetry or prose dictating "The
Horror Of War". It is assumed that because the magazine used the
ideologies of patriotism so strongly that it was never subversive, instead
repeating the "ignorant" perspective of the home front.

Punch indisputably printed vast amounts of
patriotism, and often shows ignorance of the realities of the war, but
internally there was room for exploitation. Not all of the paper is as
conformist as it first appears, and closer analysis reveals a more
disturbing picture of underlying tensions and doubts during the period of
the Great War.

This misinterpretation is crucial to the
reasons that attitudes to the Home Front are often erroneous. Modern
historians use Punch in similar way to trench songs, employing it as a
comparative source demonstrating how foolish the civilian community could be
and how limited their understanding of the war situation was. In a
typical anthology, cartoons are used as counterpoints to whatever it is the
author is trying to explain, and are rarely examined as credible or sincere
resources.

They are generally perceived as subsidiary
evidence and rarely investigated for their own merits. Punch cartoons
are often used as teaching resources for war propaganda or exam questions
requiring candidates to explain in depth how unreliable documents can be.
Therefore Punch is recognised as important source material but rarely
critiqued properly. The types of humour employed are not investigated
in depth - merely assumed to all represent the same ethos. Humour is
not taken seriously enough, particularly when it is so ostentatiously
different for the commonly mythologised concept of a horrendous and bloody
war which destroyed the optimism and lives of a whole generation.

Ultimately, Punch was a relentlessly civilian
take on the war. In many ways it had to be. Owen Seaman made the
editorial decision to follow the mood of the nation, but it would be
unrealistic to expect anything otherwise. This was both a monetary
decision and a politically motivated choice in a period when at least
initially there was tremendous enthusiasm for the war itself. As a
result of this there were many issues that Punch was not in a position to
handle - it could not satirise the casualties for example, or the increasing
spectacle of the wounded.

Additionally, it did not wish to bring up
these subjects, seeing itself as essentially moral boosting and patriotic.
A negative portrayal of the war, even in its latter stages, was not only
considered taboo at the time, but also had no place in an ultimately pro-war
source. This is why subversion in the text takes a long time to
manifest itself, and even when it does, it is important to realise that
despite its presentation, Punch did not have a unanimous voice. It is
a mistake to read it as is so often is today; as a vainglorious and naïve
text, but equally it is not a seditious cauldron of anarchic writing and
deviant voices. Sometimes it is neither, sometimes it is both at once,
sometimes it is utterly indifferent.

Punch is a valuable resource because it
demonstrates how comedy is used to diffuse the tensions of the war in a
civilian context. This trait manifests itself in several ways.
Punch certainly makes the reader aware of the geographical dispersion of the
war, trying to "report" on all fronts wherever it can. However, the
magazine had no front-line correspondents and was presumably restricted by
censorship. Front line reports are therefore vague and hazy.

They are also unanimously reported as
victories. Because Punch was a paper aimed at the home front, civilian
concerns dominate the text. These fall into five major categories; the
evil German, the position of women, shirkers, shortages, and bad news from
the home front trivialised by bad news from the fighting fronts. The
following example is typical of cartoons of this nature.

ST VALENTINES DAY IN THE FATHERLAND

(It chanced that on the fourteenth day of
February the boy Cupid strayed into the precincts of Potsdam, and came all
unawares upon the War Lord ; who , deeming him to be an alien babe, essayed
to make a characteristic end of him.)

Caricature was essential in these depictions
because of the inaccessibility of the front, and the general fears of the
civilian population. Demonisation of these groups was essential to
contain them. The German was almost always depicted specifically as
the Kaiser, who luckily for Punch was large, foreign in appearance and
dress, and ugly enough to suffer considerable facial distortion without
loosing his physiognomy.

The shirkers were weedy and displayed the
common signifiers of degeneracy in appearance, and the women either
overdressed or inappropriately dressed (i.e. as men). Of these groups,
the most problematic, the most feared and the most featured were women.

Punch gives a very telling social perspective
on the role of women during the war. The paper had already ridiculed
the suffragette movement excessively, and women were already a familiar,
easy target for Punch. During the war, the workforce shortage meant
many women took government sanctioned employment. This gave rich
pickings for the magazine, whose core readership was middle-class males, the
group most likely to find this trend threatening. However, this posed
another problem for the magazine.

Many of its readers had been posted abroad,
and it is likely that the wartime readership contained many more women.
Therefore Punch attempts to come to terms with female enfranchisement, but
at the same time it displays great unease with the position of working
women. A good example of the contradictions it enacted during this
period can be seen by the following extract from Mr Punch's History of the
Great War (Cassell, 1920). Here the text and the cartoon both function
to create a tension the magazine never manages to resolve:

Farmer (who has got a lady-help in the dairy) "Ullo Missy, What in the world be ye doin'?"

Lady. "Well, you told me to water the
cows and I'm doing it. They don't seem to like it much."

"It is quite impossible to keep pace with all
the new incarnations of women in war-time - 'bus-conductress,
ticket-collector, lift girl, club waitress, post-woman, bank clerk,
motor-drive, farm labourer, guide, munitions maker. There is nothing
new in the function of ministering angel: the myriad nurses here or abroad
are only carrying out, though in greater numbers than before, what has
always been woman's mission.

But wherever he sees one of these new
citizens, or hears fresh stories of their address and ability, Mr. Punch is
proud and delighted. Perhaps in the past, even in the present, he may
have been, or still is, a little given to chaff Englishwomen for some of
their foibles, and even their aspirations. But he never doubted how
splendid they were at heart; he never for a moment supposed they would be
anything but ready and keen when the hour of need struck." (p.96).

This commentary demonstrates clearly how
threatening the editors of Punch found the new roles of women.
Nevertheless they were aware how essential the female workforce was
becoming. The paper continued to ridicule both their new jobs and the women
who did nothing, but vacillated greatly between condoning female workers and
deriding them. This also varied between authors - some never really
changing their misogynistic views whilst others began to grudgingly give
way.

Cartoons and articles satirising women
dominated most issues. Punch found the changing role of women an easy
target, but the fact that this subject was constantly employed for comedy
throughout the war suggests that the paper was regrettably accurate in
portraying themes the public found amusing. This is a very obvious way
in which comedy was used to displace fear of change.

Despite the changing demographics of Britain
during the war, patriarchal values still dominated the modes of cultural
production. Women were supposed to be unthreatening; they had little
influence in the popular press and therefore Punch was free to enforce more
familiar attitudes of domesticity and male dominance. The return of
women to the home after the war ended demonstrates how insecure their
position was - the front line soldiers were encouraged to regard Britain as
a rural idyll, an image which they did not want to be ruined by the new and
culturally disturbing roles of a female workforce.

The roles of shirkers and Germans are again
obvious targets for the civilian population. Both groups were usually
animalised or enfeebled - it is easier to ridicule a stereotype than an
actual being. If the German portrayed was not the Kaiser, his depiction was
either of a barbarian or pig. Shirkers, who were categorised fairly
indiscriminately by Punch to include virtually all men still in Britain,
were usually shown with the well-established signifiers of degeneracy.

In the articles this tended to be
characterised by effeminacy and having a stutter, and in the cartoons by a
weak frame and a long chin with big ears. However, Punch did not
embellish this theme as it had for the women, and cartoons or articles on
conscientious objectors are rare. Possibly the behaviour of the
conscientious objector or the shirker was considered too risky to portray in
any detail because it was anti-patriotic, and to admit that they existed
was to admit a national failing.

First Conscientious Objector. "I wonder
why they've put us on to shifting this infernal manure heap."

Second ditto. "I-I did tell the Sergeant
after drill that I thought I'd be better employed in cultivating my garden
at home."

(July 5th, 1916. Artist ?)

In all of these categories, Punch had no need
to be original or inventive. In fact one of it's aims seems to have
been the opposite, enforcing a strict code of "comedy as usual" interspersed
by patriotic statements which hardly pastiched anything except an enduring
capacity for the British to show a stiff upper lip to all comers. This
only gradually began to change towards the end of the war. As the
conflict became one of attrition, the British populace began to become
slowly more disillusioned.

As this happened, a gradually more subversive
element creeps into the paper. One of the most famous examples of this
is the cartoon depicting the Versailles treaty. A peace dove struggles
to hold the log offered by President Wilson; implying that the punitive
nature of the treaty was too much to bear. This kind of criticism was
more freely expressed after the war had ended, but the discontent was
already apparent in the writing and cartoons of the magazine, which were
stretching the nationalist tone so far that the result was a reversal - it
was impossible to take these exaggerated parodies of the earlier writing
seriously.

Another way in which Punch succeeded in
bringing discomforting images to the civilian population was in its
development of sequential artwork. Comic art in this form was only
just developing in the shape of the funnies, and the more enterprising
illustrators on Punch were starting to take advantage of their popularity.
Furthermore, Seaman had a peculiar attitude to the illustrations, explaining
how they could be more obviously blatant than the articles.

When choosing which to include, he would have
the cartoons presented to him with only the captions visible, and then
reveal the artwork to decide if it corresponded with what the text implied.
It is apparent fron this that he did not appreciate fully how the synthesis
between text and image could work, and by viewing both parts individually he
was marginalizing the potentially subversive version of the two together.
One of the central artists using this new technique was H.M. Bateman.

THE RECRUIT WHO TOOK TO IT KINDLY

(H.M. Bateman, 17th January, 1917.)

This cartoon shows the animalisation of a
British recruit, suggesting the underlying fear that the war turned even the
most civilised men into aggressive barbarians. Importantly in this
cartoon, the recruit is displaced from the act of killing by using a
sparring dummy, but nevertheless his actions towards it clearly suggest the
viciousness and savagery implicit in the act of killing. Bateman,
Fougasse and Bird all utilise this technique and possibly exposed a wider
reading public to a new form of illustration.

It is very noticeable within the paper that it
is these artists who often deal with the more difficult issues of the war
involving munitions, explosions, men at war and the ignorance of commanding
officers. The audience is displaced by the use of more expressionist
forms of art rather than the strictly literal pen and ink style artwork of
Townsend or Raven-Hill, whose old-school techniques did not adapt and
continue to illustrate statements or propaganda.

Punch had a wide readership and was freely
available to the civilian public. It was also often sent to the front
for soldiers, (specifically, officers) to read. But in the front lines
its reception seems to have been less than enthusiastic - in fact it is
commonly recalled as useful for nothing better than high-quality toilet
paper.

It is easy to see why the paper was regarded
with such derision. To the soldiers at the front Punch must have
seemed trivial and ridiculously inaccurate; galling and offensive, full of
trite propaganda and wilfully ignorant of the realities of warfare.
For example, the Battle of the Somme was hardly reported in the magazine.
Two weeks after the advance which was responsible for over 60 000 casualties
in the first day, Punch's reaction was merely the cartoon by Townsend:

(July 12th, 1916)

The issues immediately following the attack
contained little comment on the fighting, except to report another victory.
In 1919, Mr Punch's History of the Great War was still insistently reporting
that:

"The results of the battle of the Somme are
shown in a variety of ways: by the reticence and admissions of the German
press, by its efforts to divert attention to the exploits of the German
submarine cruiser Deutschland; above all, by the Kaiser's fresh explosions
of piety...Mr. Punch finds the usual difficulty in getting any details from
his correspondents when they have been or are in the thick of the fighting.
Practically all that they have to say is that there was a "damned noise,"
that breakfast was delayed by the "morning hate," or that an angry sub
besought a weary O.C. "to ask our gunners not to serve faults into our front
line wire." (P.99-100).

Perhaps as a counterpoint to this kind of
drivel, factions in the trenches began to produce their own papers.
The most famous of these is The Wipers Times, whose name changed as fast as
its location, later becoming The "New Church" Times, The Kemmel Times, The
Somme Times, and resigning itself eventually to The B.E.F. Times.
However, there were also over one hundred other papers produced by
individual units and battalions. Collectively, these were known as
Trench newspapers, or more often by the soldiers as Trench Rags. The
trench papers are markedly different from civilian journals in both content
and attitude, and despite the fact that they were officially sanctioned,
they provide a substantially altered viewpoint, one which often seems
tasteless and dark to a modern reader.

Trench magazines can be roughly split into two
categories. The first were aimed exclusively aimed at the soldiers,
often a particular battalion, and the second type were designed for joint
consumption by the soldiers and the home front, specifically relatives
waiting at home for news. Most British citizens had never been abroad
- finding it difficult to imagine what France was like. More distant
locations were even more problematic (the British troops arriving in Italy
were amazed that not all of them were ice-cream sellers). Most
magazines of the first type tended to be produced by troops further from
home.

They were light-hearted and jovial accounts of
the battalions that tended to conform to the ideals of the home front.
Although these magazines tried to stress how difficult life at the front
could be, they did this in the "keep smiling" attitude encouraged by the
press at home. Their aim was to portray army life in ways the
civilians could understand and admire - typical of this was the intentions
of The Dagger to "show the good folk at home what we are thinking and
doing…we can't tell them much in our letters and one leave a year" (Nov,
1918).

However, these magazines had a limited appeal
as there were few things which the troops could (or wanted to) say in the
spirit of patriotism and enthusiasm for the war. Censorship would
prevented direct references to place or activities, and more factual aspects
of war could not be included as they were unpleasant and misunderstood at
home. It is worth saying at this point that the soldier was just as
interested in continuing to pretend all was well to the civilians as the
civilians were willing to ignore the true facts of the war.

The soldiers were extremely concerned that
they would be seen as barbaric if the true circumstances of the war were
revealed - that their actions during the war would be condoned and feared by
people who had not experienced the fighting firsthand. Because of
these factors, magazines of this type often floundered after a few issues.

The problem with this type of magazine was
encouraging a consistent readership. The soldiers wanted a magazine
relating to their own circumstances in a more realistic and believable way.
Although they wanted to portray a positive image to the civilians, they also
wanted them to understand the conditions and experiences they were
enduring. Because of this tension, overtly patriotic and unrealistic
magazines failed.

As a community, the soldiers appreciated
trench journals aimed more exclusively at them. The satire and humour
of these magazines helped reinvent the situation at the front - diffusing
the conditions of the war by ridiculing and exaggerating them. Trench
journals circulated at the Front encouraged the sense of a community with
common aims.

They contained endless successions of "in"
jokes - aspects which drew the soldiers together as a cohesive unit sharing
experiences and emphasised their exclusivity - they were privy to events
that other people could not understand, and as a result they were able to
share private jokes with each other. This type of double-bind was
extremely important - it drew the army closer in a communal sense, but it
also enforced their separateness from other groups, including the home
front.

The Wipers Times is possibly the best example
of this. Its popularity can be seen in its longevity - not only did it
have an extensive readership, but was printed for over two years. It
ran from February 1916 until just after the war had ended. There were
even two editions printed after the war under the name of "The Better
Times".

Unlike the regular weekly instalments of
Punch, the production of The Wipers Times depended on the editors being in
reserve with an area where they could set up their printing press. The
press had been salvaged from the ruins of Ypres by the Sherwood Foresters,
and although the paper was not officially sanctioned by the B.E.F., it was
additionally circulated around most of the Western Front.

The authorship of the Wipers Times is
relatively uncertain. It is known that it was edited by Lieut-Col F.J.
Roberts, who later received the Military Cross. Submissions were
encouraged, although the paper famously protested against the amount of
poetry it received as a result:

We regret to announce that an insidious
disease is affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry.
Subalterns have been seen with a notebook in one hand, and bombs in the
other absently walking near the wire in deep communication with the muse…The
editor would be obliged if a few of the poets would break into prose as a
paper cannot live by "poems" alone.

(This is the most quoted article of the paper
- again the rest of the contents are often ignored because they do not
contain items which a modern audience can fit into the idea of the War
Myth). The contributors do not usually sign their names, instead using
appropriate pseudonyms - "one who would like to know", "Grandpa", "Teech
Bomas" (after Beach Thomas, a correspondent from The Daily Mail).

This is a useful technique as the journal
often pastiches civilian journalists that its readers would have remembered.
These pseudonyms conveyed the idea of the type of caricature represented,
and in this way new writers could take over should the original author be
injured or posted elsewhere.

The paper's style was also restricted by the
situations of production. Articles had to be written in the limited
free time the soldier had; in dugouts, reserve lines or on rest. To
compensate for this, The Wipers Times used a series of mock advertisements,
all containing quick jokes, puns and commentary. These were again
emulative of the home front but contained topical jokes - advertising
occupied land as country retreats, using army slang, or mentioning specific
brands of equipment used by the army: "Are you ready for winter?…We can
supply you from the "Dernier Cri" (behind the lines) in Macintoshes to Gum
Boots" (B.E.F Times 1#1).

There was always a mock theatre or cinema
programme from the Ypres Cloth Hall, long since destroyed by shellfire.
These advertisements were extremely inventive and arguably contained some of
the more subversive aspects of the journal:

Can you sketch?
Some of you may be able to draw corks.
Very few of you can draw any more money.
Probably some of you can draw sketches.

Here is a letter I have just received from a
pupil at the front :-

"The other day by mischance I was left out in
No-Man's Land. I rapidly drew a picture with a piece of chalk of a
tank going into action, and while the Huns were firing at this I succeeded
in returning to the trenches unobserved"

Could you have done this?

Send a copy of the following on a cheque :-
Francs 500 -

And by return I will send you a helpful
criticism and my fourteen prospectuses. Please sign your name in the
bottom right-hand corner to prevent mistakes.

Corps Christmas Card Company.

The reason for these advertisements had
another explanation. Firstly, the editors were trying to fill up
space, and it was easier to so with a small amount of large words.
Secondly, they had only a limited number of printing blocks. This is
also why the paper had very few cartoons - they were extremely difficult to
reproduce as they had to be hand engraved.

The Wipers Times #5

(One of the only cartoons printed in the
paper, this is a submission of the most popular and repeated joke in the
paper. The "rose" guttering underneath the text is one of the printing
blocks found with the press in Ypres.)

A limited number of illustrations had been
discovered alongside the press and were designed to compliment the typeface
- these included the banners, the gutters and the line dividers. If no
typeset was left however, spare dashes and "o"'s were used.

"--o--o--o--o--o--"

By laying out the paper as a pastiche, it was
far easier for the writers to be more openly subversive than Punch.
The paper could be sent home without too much concern as it superficially
appeared to praise and admire the B.E.F. Roberts noted in his preface
to the collected edition:

"Somehow we expected the paper to appeal to
a very limited section, even of those who were in France. That its
appeal was much wider is shown by the welcome accorded to the book in all
circles. I have noticed that the present youngsters, who were small
boys in those days, seem to delight in it, and I have to spend hours in
explaining some of the advertisements and other items which are to them
rather baffling." (The Wipers Times, 1920, Eveleigh Nash & Grayson Ltd.).

An audience at the home front appreciated the
style of the jokes without really understanding the context. The
magazine contained army jargon, which would not have been understood or was
only partially appreciated - by using an exclusive language, the journal
became insular; aimed at an exclusive readership and giving a sense of a
gang or club. Outsiders could look and admire, but were not actively
encouraged to join.

The tone of The Wipers Times can be split into
two categories. One is a self-conscious and predominantly middle-class
style derivative of the home front press and literature. The other is
excessively sentimental, and couched in a far more clumsy manner. In
The Riddles of Wipers (1997, Pen and Sword), John Ivelaw-Chapman analyses
these methods of production, but makes the mistake of identifying the two
separate traits as one and the same. He seems to simultaneously to fall for
the contrived, satirical attitude of bonhomie within the magazines and to
confuse it with the more genuine attitude of the sentimental articles.

Ivenlaw-Chapman claims that "the target
audience of The Wipers Times was young officers in the 19-22 age group, of
good background and education, who were well indoctrinated with the
Christian ethics of the day and who were constantly aware of their
responsibilities as gentlemen" (p.67). To an extent this is true.
The paper was produced by young middle-class officers, and their ideologies
are apparent in the regular articles of the paper both in terms of style and
contents.

The poetry often shows an awareness of a
classical education and the spoof articles emulate the conservative British
press (The Mail, Country Life). However, Ivenlaw-Chapman is mistaken
in taking this ethos at face value: it is this atmosphere of false
enthusiasm and chivalry which the paper continually derides. At times
the writing is anything but light-hearted - many articles using this
technique to express themes and ideas which would otherwise have been
condoned:

This article is obviously produced by an
educated man. The use of the words "volubly" and " abominable"
demonstrate advanced vocabulary, and the stilted speech echoes that of the
public schoolboy. However, this extract is obviously satire, although
it portrays the situation as amusing, it is equally miserable and
disturbing. This kind of depiction blending satire with fact simply
did not appear in the civilian papers.

The less ironic submissions for the Wipers
Times expound very different themes. The editor was right to complain
of " a hurricane of poetry", as a great deal of these contributions are
sentimental discourses or even more sentimental poems. Although very
little is known about these contributors, I would tentatively suggest the
following.

Most of the submissions were by working-class
soldiers. There are two reasons for this theory. The first is
that the submissions emulate articles within the Wipers Times and do not
demonstrate such a strong educated background, and the second is their
apparent lack of irony; a bluntness in the text which came from the need to
express oneself after the constant stress and pressure which came from
active service.

The majority of non-commissioned soldiers on
active service were working-class men. Trench journalism was possibly
the first opportunity they would have had to express themselves publicly.
Again, it was carried out in an atmosphere where their contribution would be
valued - it could be anonymous and it would be appreciated by the mutually
exclusive world of trench life.

Possibly the best example of this is To My
Chum. This is a heartfelt and moving poem, but it is not a good one.
The stanzas rhyme clumsily; the cadence is broken and erratic, and there is
little originality in the expressions within the poem. Evidence within
the poem determine the soldier is a private - references to shared billets,
shelter and food suggesting the life of a Tommy, not an officer. There
are no classical citations but there are allusions to army slang,
particularly the terms of friendship used. "Mate", "pal" and "old lad"
were used by the Tommies.

Many of the submissions are recognisable for
these traits - they dwell on a series of set expressions regarding the war,
friendship, and descriptions of trench life. These devices make the
submissions more easy to spot, but the other factor is the absence of irony.
"To My Chum" is meant to be taken seriously, there is no sub textual
meaning. However this in itself is an incredibly subversive view.
For a poem such as this to be published, with such overt references to
strong homosocial bonds, is something the home front would have considered
extreme and possibly unnatural. To allow a poem which expresses such a
raw grief for a friend and to include the coldness of the threat of
vengeance is a far more emotionally aggressive technique than the British
press used.

This deviance draws both types of journalism
together. On both counts The Wipers Times contains one of the most
subversive viewpoints of the war. It expounds a discourse which was
excluded from the papers of the home front - that of first hand experiences
of the soldiers. The way in which the paper was written expresses one
of the least privileged versions of the war in which the soldiers satirise
and reinvent themselves and their situation on an almost immediate basis.

Magazines such as Punch instil the ethos of a
successful war into their satire, however the trench magazines successfully
blend irreverence with a real awareness of the conditions of warfare.
In this way the trench magazines address issues that are often ignored or
reinvented by the civilian press. The trench magazines refer to the
enemy as an equal rather than demonising him - the German is merely another
man who is unfortunately in the same situation as the Tommy. The
papers dwell on conditions and grumbles; there are no stirring speeches
unless in tones of irony. No references are made to whether the war
will end or not - it is merely a situation to be endured. The
destruction and casualties of war are referred to as commonplace occurrence.

The writing is more blatantly discontented
with the army authorities and the ways in which the B.E.F. is organised;
again the context in which this is mentioned are couched to sound like an
inevitable grumble. Although all of these ideas seem obvious to a
contemporary reader, these discourses were not even considered publicly (on
the home front during and after the war), until after the War Books
Controversy in 1929. In the trench magazines they are a surprising and
often exceptionally callous technique, but unlike the post-1929 mythology,
there is no residual bitterness. The "alphabets" contain very good
examples of this. They were published regularly within the paper and
were often sent as submissions - their simple style being an easy form to
emulate:

T for the TRENCHES themselves (this is where I
must take heed what I write, or I'll swear!)

Which have blackened our souls, and have
whitened our hair: Oh! Life is a dream in the trenches.

W for WHISKEY and WHIZZ-BANGS as well:

Of the Former I've almost forgotten the smell,

Whilst the latter contribute to make it like
Hell.

At various times in the trenches.

(The B.E.F Times, Vol 1 #4 5/3/1917).

There is a gigantic amount of information to
be absorbed in the trench magazines. They give such a strong depiction
of the war that it is shameful how little has been written about them.
In Troop Morale and Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 1991), J.G.
Fuller undertakes an extensive survey of trench journals which he
continually reiterates their importance as documentary evidence regarding he
war:

They are not coloured by subsequent experience
and they represent a collective rather than an individual commentary,
validated to a large extent by their soldier audience. In addition,
they deliberately set out, in many cases, to capture the spirit of the army.

They addressed themselves directly and
continuously to a task which letters and diaries tackle only peripherally
and randomly. Even without this purpose, the journals were themselves
an expression of collective culture…They served, moreover, as a means of
intra-unit communication, with the result that there lodge in their pages
not only essential details of unit administration, but also many details of
the jealousies and feelings otherwise perhaps too trivial to be generally
recorded, but important to the historian. (p.4).

In The Wipers Times, the section "Things We
Want to Know" contains a series of questions and comments that seem to sum
up the issues at the heart of the paper. The most repeated joke of the
paper appears here, the question "Are we as offensive as we might be?"
(B.E.F. Times, vol.1 #2).

This simple and effective pun demonstrates the
over-riding feeling that the soldiers had of the ridiculousness of their
situation, their concerns and grumbles, and their attempts to trivialise
awful events through a comic medium. This has a far more immediate
effect than other satirical documents, conveying an incredibly subversive
and under-rated view of the war. As with Punch, there are many things
in the trench magazines which genuinely disturb the modern reader and not
only bring home the conditions at the front, but the ways in which soldiers
reacted to them.

The uncompromising nature of the trench
journals, especially The Wipers Times, show just how much the war myth has
been distorted - the writers are not naïve fools, but equally they are far
from brave or noble. Articles written in the magazine can be
alternately are petty and devious, often referring to thievery, shirking and
cowardice. Although these are cleverly couched in ways the home front
reader would not recognise, it is indisputable that this type of evidence
gives a far more realistic picture of the war than those recreated in
subsequent writing or in home front journalism.

However, despite all of the negative aspects
portrayed in the journals, there is always a sense of determination about
them, produced and sustained by the communal feelings they created amongst
the troops. Even though there is little recognition of the actual
goals of the war (defeating the Germans, regaining territory), there is
still a powerful sense of the "rightness" of the war, an ethos that places
more emphasis on loyalty, friendship and communality. The soldiers are
fighting for their "chums," and not the long distant generals.

They do not see the Germans "over there" as an
enemy, rather a nuisance which is fighting for similar (if misguided)
reasons. Combined with the more removed and ideological aims of Punch,
these papers are utterly essential in demonstrating how a nation at war
developed strategies to diffuse fear and grief by providing mediums for
self-expression and shared experience.